Working with modview almost needs a tutorial in itself. If you’re
adventurous
you’ve probably played around with it enough to the point where you
know
what you’re doing, but for those a bit more conservative please read
on.

Before begining this tutorial you will need
to have downloaded the JKII Editing tools; unpacked the models/players/_humanoidfolder,
and also the folder you wish to view from the assets0.pk3
(kyle for this tutorial) into your base
folder.

When opening a file in modview the the file pathway
must start at a folder named base,
then continue on down to the folder in which the file you're wanting to
open is.

When opening both JA and JO player models, the
folder_humanoidand it's contents must be in the players folder in order
for modview to open the file. Since the JO and JA _humanoidfolders contain different files, you
need to have a seperate directory set up for each
of them.

Basic ModView Operation

All right, I know that you’re not a complete idiot, and you know
how to open a program,… right? Okay, now that we’ve got it open let’s
see what we have. We have the standard pull down menus lining the
top, and a toolbar just under them. In the toolbar we have the standard
icons inclded in most programs new, open, save, etc,…

Opening a ModelFirst we need to open a model. While in ModView click on the
open icon, or click and pull down the file menu to open. Now browse
through the folders until you come to: \Star Wars JK II
Jedi Outcast\GameData\base\models\players, and look through
the available folders until you find 'kyle'. Since this is
your first time I thought I would start with a familiar face. Open
the model.glm by either double clicking it or select it and click the open
button. Now if you’ve followed my instructions correctly you should
be seeing Kyle Katarn’s ugly mug.

Positioning the ModelNow we need to get a better view of the model. With the mouse,
use the left button and click on the viewing screen and hold it down.
This will turn the model to the left and right, up and down. Cool huh?!

Okay now that we’ve established that we can change the angle we view
him at,….
You did get him to turn right?

We now move on to the right mouse button. When you click and hold
it down while on the viewing screen, you can zoom in and out by moving
the mouse up and down. I know what you’re thinking, “Well, who wants
a nice close up picture of his knees?”… right?

Press the left mouse button and holding down the ‘ALT’ key on the keyboard.
This should give you the freedom to move the model around and focus on
any part of it that you wish. Now should you wish to reset the angle
and distance of the model to it’s original position, click the button on
the right side of the toolbar,
which looks like o-o-o.

ScreenshotsWhen you want to share how your model looks with the rest of the world
the best way to do it is by taking a screenshot from ModView. In
order to do this, simply position the model how you like and press CNTRL+C,
which will copy the image viewing window. Now open up your image
editor and paste it as a new image. And there you have your screen
shot. If the text is still present at the top of the image you can
turn it off for the screenshot by accessing the view pulldown menu and
selecting the ‘remove all highlights/text etc before taking screenshot’
option. This will remove all seen text from the screenshots, with
the exception of the Raven copyright in the lower left hand corner.

Now what the hell am I doing???

Okay, We’ve covered the basics, and now we want to try more,…
So what else
is there? Well, a lot actually.

We’ll start with the white bar on the left side of the window, I’m sure
you’ve noticed it by now and are dying to know what it is. At the
very top you’ll see the model.glm again and before it the box with the
+ inside it. Click the box and it should start up a directory tree.
We should have Surfaces, Tag Surfaces, Bones, Skins Available, and Sequences.
Let’s start at the beginning.

SurfacesThe 3-D model we’ve been looking at is made up of various shaped polygons.
When you group these polygons together you create a surface. Now
open the Surfaces section of the directory tree. Click on the word Surfaces.
When you do this, it highlights the polygons that make up all the surfaces
of the 3-D model. Click on the word ’////////stupidtriangle_off’ to remove
the polygon highlights.

Now open the ’////////stupidtriangle_off’ section, and then the hips
section. You should have the majority of the Surfaces tree
open now. All right, we can see three types of sections written now.
They are the ones that are just simply words, ones that start with an *,
and ones that start with ////////. The words that start with the
* are tagged surfaces, We don’t really need to worry about those right
now. The other two types are the surfaces. The ones with ////////
in front of them, are surfaces that have been turned off. You can
turn surfaces off and on by right clicking the word and selecting either
‘set status : on’ or off. Let’s try it out. Say we want Kyle
Katarn, but without his shoulder pad. First we open the torso section,
then the 5th section down is the ‘torso_shoulder_pad’ surface. Right click
this and set status to off. We should now hve Kyle without his shoulder
pad. You can experiment with turning the surfaces on and off, but
remember this is only for the modview’s use and does not save which surfaces
have been turned on or off. When you’re done playing around with
it, and you want to have it back to the way it was before you can simply
right click on the Surfaces menu and choose the appropriate
option

Tag Surfaces and BonesBeginners probably won’t really need to mess with the Tag Surfaces
or the Bones, so we’ll leave those to the more experienced editors. I've
included some of their functions at the bottom of this page.

Skins AvailableThis is where we can view the different skins for this model.
When we open the Skins section we get a new list of skins. the model is
always reverted to the default skin when you start. You can notice
that the team skins (red & blue) are located here. Let’s open the blue
one shall we,… Simply double click the word blue, and it will replace the
skin previously visible on the model. If you’ve altered a texture
of the skin while the model is open, you can refresh the textures by clicking
the button on the right half of the toolbar, which looks like the word
‘TEX’ sitting above an oval.

Now that we have that covered let’s move on to the animations.

SequencesWe’ve seen the model in it’s default pose, but what does it look like
in different positions or when it moves? Here’s where you find out.
Like before open up the sequences section of the directory tree.
You are now given a list of every animation used throughout the game.
The very top one is the default pose for modview. You can select
an animation by double clicking it. Double click the third selection under
the sequences section. It should be titled 'BOTH_A1_BL_TR'.
Now look up in the tool bar you should see something that looks like it
was ripped off the front of your VCR. The buttons with the arrows
are pretty self explanatory, rewind, back one frame, stop, forward one
frame, etc,… Click the single arrow pointing to the right and the
model will move through the animation. By clicking the double arrows
it will set the animation to the starting or ending position. By clicking
the arrows with the vertical lines you can send the animation back or forward
one frame. By clicking the square you can stop the model from animating.

Other Options

Now that we’ve learned all the basic functions of the model viewer,
I’ll start to cover some of the lesser used functions. I’m going
to jump around rather sporadically here, as I don’t even use all of the
functions. I’ll just try to cover what I use the most, then work
my way out from there,…

.MVS FilesThe mvs files are files that tell ModView which surfaces to turn on
or off, the skin to be viewed, and the sequence to pose the model in, when
opening the glm file. Say you’re working on a model that uses surfaces,
which can be turned off, and you don’t plan on using them. You can
open up your model and and have these surfaces turned on and off for you
automatically. Just open a mvs file instead of the glm file.
But how do you create a mvs file??? First get the model how you want
it to be, including skin, surfaces, and sequence. Now use the FILE
pulldown menu and select ’write script’. This will create your mvs file.
Just save it into the directory of the model you are using. When
you want to open your mvs file simply use the FILE pulldown menu again
and select ’read script’.

Alpha TransparenciesThrough the use of shaders in the game you can get transparent textures
which utilize alpha transparencies. The model viewer is capable of
viewing these transparencies, but for some reason the effect is opposite
of what it will be in-game. Simply use the VIEW pulldown menu and
select ‘… using alpha blend’.

LOD’sThe game engine utilizes LOD’s, or levels of detail, to help save on
the amount of polygons on the screen at one time. Depending on the
distance from the viewer, the game will accesses lower poly models to save
on space. There are 4 LOD’s in JKII, 1 being the highest, and 4 the
lowest. You can view these by pressing the F keys, F1 = LOD1, F2
= LOD2, Etc,…

Background ColorYou can change the color of the background in your viewer by using
the ‘choose background colour’ from the EDIT pulldown menu.
I don’t really advise this unless you’reworking with a lot of gray in your
skin. The default gray is a fairly neutral color and will work best
in most situations.

Advanced Usage

Here are a few functions that the average user doesn't really have
a need for.

Tag SurfacesUnless you plan on doing some model or animation editing you won’t
need to mess with the Tag Surfaces or the Bones, so we’ll leave those to
the more experienced editors. However, if you want to see what a
weapon will look like in the models hand you can add a weapon by following
these instructions. Expand the Tags list, right-click on the *r_hand
tag,
select bolt model to this tag surface (adding to any already there)

then find the weapon you want to put in his hand. We'll just
use base\models\weapons2\briar_pistol\briar_pistol_w.glmthe
weapon should now be in his hand as if he were holding it.

BonesNow say I want the model to look like he's holding the stormtrooper
blaster while running. There is no set animation for this, but it's
a combination of two different sequences. The process isn't easy,
and I don't suggest you bother with this unless you feel like you know
what you're doing.

First we'll select the point where the two animations will differ.
For the effect we want we need to choose the upper lumbar.
Right click the upper lumbar and choose set as secondary anim start.
Since the hirarchy works from the pelvis outward, this will effct everything
from the abdomen up.

Now we need to choose our animations. Find BOTH_RUN1
right click it and choose Add to Multi-Lock sequences.
Now his lower half is set to play out the running sequence.

Now find TORSO_WEAPONREADY3 and right click it, only this
time choose Add to Secondary Multi-Lock sequences.
This will set everything from the upper lumbar up to the weapon ready sequence.

Now if you hit the play button the model should look like he's running
while holding the blaster. The game features multiple combinations
of animations, but I think that ModView only supports two at a time.

That’s all for now,… If you have
any questions about the tutorial,additions you think should be made,
or comments about me personally,just let me know,…